What'sar''means—seizures,madness,andthevocabularyofthejinn'stouch

Before the next page compares medical epilepsy with jinn-caused seizures, it helps to untangle the words — because in classical Arabic the vocabulary of seizures, madness and the jinn's touch all runs together, and knowing the words shows you how the scholars thought about the whole subject.

Ṣar'

Today the word usually means the epileptic seizure: a convulsive disorder — a temporary dysfunction in the brain affecting the nervous system, producing convulsions mild or strong, in which the person may fall, the eyes bulge, the tongue is bitten and foam appears. The classical position the source states is that ṣar' "may be organic or spiritual" — caused by the body, or by a jinnī. The word is also used more loosely for episodes of derangement in speech and action that come at intervals from mass.

Junūn (madness)

The Hanafi jurists' definition (from the Ḥāshiyah of Ibn 'Abidin, Book of Divorce): the failure of the faculty that distinguishes the good from the ugly and foresees consequences — its effects no longer appearing, its workings suspended. They then list three causes: a deficiency the brain was created with; the brain's temperament thrown off balance by an imbalance or disease; or the shayṭān gaining mastery over the person and casting corrupt imaginings into him, so that he rejoices and panics without any fitting cause. Notice: the classical jurists themselves listed organic and satanic causes side by side, in one legal definition.

Lamam

Madness — and also, in another usage, minor sins. The malmūm is the madman; "a lammah from the jinn struck him" means a mass, a touch. The related "al-'ayn al-lāmmah" is the eye that strikes with harm. In the hadith recorded by Abu Dawud and al-Hakim, 'A'ishah relates that Jamilah was the wife of Aws ibn aṣ-Ṣāmit, "a man who had lamam — and when his lamam grew intense he would pronounce ẓihār against his wife": the episode behind the opening of Sūrat al-Mujādilah.

Mass

Literally "to touch with the hand"; borrowed for striking and for intercourse (both being touch), and then for madness — as if the jinn had touched him. "Bihi massun min junūn" — there is a touch of madness in him (an-Nihāyah of Ibn al-Athir). This is the word the Quran uses in al-Baqarah 2:275, and the word this whole section of the site is named for.

Ṭayf / Ṭā'if

Said of a boy: "a lamam or a ṭayf from the jinn has struck him" — something of them has come over him. Originally the word meant madness; it was then used for anger, and for the shayṭān's touch and whisper. Both readings — ṭayf and ṭā'if — are transmitted in the verse "Indeed, those who fear Allah — when an impulse (ṭā'if) from Satan touches them, they remember..." (al-A'rāf 7:201). From the same root comes the dream-apparition (ṭayf al-khayāl) that visits a sleeper.

What the words add up to

All these terms converge on one picture: a shayṭān of the jinn has gained some hold over a person's mind, heart or body. Ordinary people say it in their own ways — "he has harm on him", "he has a follower", "his qarīn is with him", "he has a zar" — all meaning: he is afflicted with mass, for one cause or another.

And Ibn al-Qayyim widens the lens with a sentence worth sitting with (Zād al-Ma'ād, vol. 3): "If the veil were lifted, you would see most human souls felled (ṣar'ā) before these wicked spirits — captives in their grip, driven wherever they wish... and the greatest ṣar' is the one whose victim only comes round at death." His point: the seizure you can see is rare; the seizure of heedlessness — a life driven by the shayāṭīn without a single convulsion — is everywhere. The remedy for both is the same remembrance.